Mainly Norfolk: English
Folk and Other Good Music

Bold Riley

The origins of Bold Riley O appear to be shrouded in mystery;
it does not appear in Stan Hugill's 1961 shanty “bible”
Shanties from the Seven Seas
or any earlier collections. Its first appearance seems to A.L. Lloyd
singing it in 1962 on the Prestige album
A Sailor's Garland,
where he commented in the sleeve notes:

Shellbacks manning the windjammers of the West Indies trade brought back to
Liverpool and Bristol more than sugar, bananas and rum; they also brought back
many songs. Some of these they kept to themselves, some they handed on to
vessels sailing in other waters. Thus the fine hexatonic tune of
Bold Riley O, which started life as a Tobago reel, was sung at the
halyards of many an East Indiaman bound for Bombay and the Bengal ports.

A.L. Lloyd also sang Bold Riley O in 1974 on the Topic anthology
Sea Shanties.
His four verses are all “floaters” that also appear in other
shanties, such as
Bound for the Rio Grande,
Goodbye, Fare Thee Well
and
Leave Her, Johnny,
and present-day singers often choose to sing them in a different order;
in the chorus some sing “sweetheart” in the first line and
“darling” in the third, while others reverse the order. Likewise,
the “boom-a-lay” in the first refrain is nowadays often replaced
by another “Bold Riley”, so it is quite rare for any two versions
to have exactly the same words in exactly the same places.

Bold Riley was later recorded by Jeff Warner on
the 1976 Collector album
Steady As She Goes.

Kate Rusby learned Bold Riley
from the singing of Jim Mageean. She sang it with Davy Steele
in 1997 on her first solo album,
Hourglass.
This track was also included in 2002 on her 10th anniversary album,
10.

Tim van Eyken and Rob Harbron learned Bold Riley
from Graham O'Callaghan and sang it in 2001 on their Beautiful Jo album
One Sunday Afternoon.

Bold Reilly Gone Away, I got from a Danish seaman who worked on the
salvage tugs out of the port or Korsør. He said it came from the ships of the
East India Company; formed in 1600 it had the monopoly on trade with the East
Indies and had many large, armed merchantmen. While these ships were at sea
the wives had the right to draw half of the seaman's pay for sustenance. So
‘white-stocking day’ was when they dressed up and headed to the
shipping office to collect. If the truth is known they might then go on a spree
with their fancy man.

The Teacups recorded Bold Riley
in November 2012 for their Haystack CD
One for the Pot,
referring to A.L. Lloyd's album as their source. This video shows them at
The Hothouse Festival, Halsway Manor, in Somerset in 2015:

John Bowden and Sheafknot sang Bold Riley
in 2015 on Vic Shepherd and John Bowden's Hallamshire Traditions CD
Still Waters.
They noted:

The origins of this shanty are unclear. It is not found in collections such
as Hugill's
Shanties from the Seven Seas
and its ﬁrst appearance seems to be on the LP
A Sailor's Garland
(1952), sung by A.L. Lloyd. Lloyd claimed to have collected it from sailors in
Bristol who had sailed in the West lndies rum and sugar trade. and said that
the melody had been recorded as a “Tobago reel”; however, there is
more than a slight suspicion that the song may have been largely one of
Lloyd's own creations!

‘White Stocking Day’ was the day each month when a sailor's
female relatives dressed up in their best clothes to collect his half-pay or
‘allotment’. However. not all sailors made provision for the women
to collect this allotment, preferring to take a larger advance payment for
themselves, and this problem inspired the famous Liverpool feminist social
campaigner and MP Eleanor Rathbone to demand o more equitable system of
providing for sailors’ and soldiers' dependants during the First World War,
eventually culminating in her Family Allowances Act of 1945.